There are some engaging and personally enriching stories behind this, beginning with the valuable service of The Fisher House Foundation and the achievements of its super-patriot founder Zachary Fisher, including his purchase of the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier.

Then there’s the multifaceted Family Forest® and its amazingly interconnected web of generation-by-generation family ties that spans continents and thousands of years.

Could it really be true, as I believe, that at least one billion living people, including most of the people serving in the U. S. Armed Forces today, are descendants of this Shakespeare character?

Could it also be true, as I believe, that if you have any European ancestry within the last four centuries, you almost certainly have parts of your own early family heritage chronicled in this digital resource?

If printed, it would be a “book” that is five feet wide, as large or larger than most sets of encyclopedias. Even though it is in Adobe eBook format, doesn’t such a huge digital resource belong in a category other than eBook?

Imagine what it might mean to your children and grandchildren if you could show them they really do have family ties to the founding of America and the American Revolution, knights and ancient warriors, nobility and royalty, or even a character from Shakespeare who is portrayed in Hollywood movies.

It’s quicker and makes so much more sense to see it instead of read about it. There are more than a dozen short videos via the links below. They range from how-to vidoes, to visions of the future. Please enjoy.

You may not have heard of the Family Forest® Project because we haven’t been advertising, but over the last 18 years, the Family Forest® has received some great media coverage locally, nationally, and internationally. Most of the url’s have disappeared, but a good representation is still available through the links below. The Family Forest® will amaze you when you discover what it does.

A very bright anthropology student from Michigan, with a personal interest in mathematics, statistics and probability theory, asked for my opinion on some of his interesting thoughts about where we all came from. Here is my reply.

I wish I had your knowledge of, and skills with, numbers so I could respond more intelligently to your thoughts and questions. Following are some of my thoughts based on what I’ve read, and what I see daily as I visually travel back and forth through the most extremely interconnected web of thousands of years of ancestral history (the Family Forest®), based on recorded history.

I believe that the theoretical estimate that an average person in 1500 has about 1.5 million offspring alive today is too low. Here’s why.

The Family Forest® is based on what actually did happen, according to recorded history, and not on what might happen, theoretically. Here are a few examples of what can happen in just one century.

Martha (Clarke) Willard (b. 1694, d. 1794) was said to have had 12 children, 90 grandchildren, 206 great-grandchildren, and 45 great-great-grandchildren when she died at the age of 100.

Catharine (Andrews) Shattuck (b. 2/16/1753 Ipswich, MA, d. 11/19/1845 Temple, NH) was said to have had 150 living descendants when she died, seven children, 51 grandchildren, 90 great-grandchildren, and two great-great-grandchildren when she died.

In addition, I believed I read that one of the foremost living genealogists, Gary Boyd Roberts, estimated that prominent Colonial ancestor Governor Thomas Dudley may have 10 million descendants.

So couple the three actual one-century examples from above with the 1600 estimates, and it seems that a reasonable estimate from a 1500 person is tens of millions of living descendants.

It would be difficult to factor in the overlap that would need to be subtracted, but certainly the number should be very large.

Considering how many boxes each of us would need to fill in to truly know a substantial part of our deep ancestry (http://familyforest.com/resources/51/ancestors-at-a-glance), it may seem reasonable to assume that going back 400-500 years ago, we most certainly had at least one Japanese or Chinese ancestor.

Visually exploring so many generation-by-generation ancestral pathways zig-zagging geographically over the millennia in the Family Forest®, according to recorded history, leads me to the following opinions.

My odds of having at least one Japanese or Chinese ancestor in the last 500 years is in the range of slim to none. During the last 1,000 years, the odds becomes quite possible. During the last 2,000 years, I believe it is almost certain.

I also believe that the reverse is true about Japanese or Chinese descendants having some European ancestors.

Hopefully this helps. Please stay tuned here for a free Family Forest® give-a-way that will be available in a couple of days. It will help illustrate genetic migration over centuries.

That’s exactly what Bruce Harrison, the mastermind behind Family Forest®, would have thought before he spent tens of thousands of hours questing through the nooks and crannies of recorded history, filtering and distilling the knowledge that was assembled by experts, and digitally-indexing the results into an amazingly interconnected network of ancestral pathways that can now be explored visually.

The attached chart is a small example of the answers the Family Forest® can generate. Here’s what you will find: The first column is 21 people. The second column shows their connection to the Oscars, and the third column shows their role. The next four columns show the computer-generated relationships of the 21 people in the first column to other people.

The fifth column is Seth MacFarlane, Host of the 85th Academy Awards. The next column is to the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, the present Lord of Highclere Castle, which is the setting for PBS’ enormously popular series Downton Abbey.

Highclere Castle is also the setting for “Lady Almina And The Real Downton Abbey”, a present-day New York Times best-seller written by the 8th and current Countess of Carnarvon. The 8th Earl of Carnarvon has extensive early Colonial American ancestry, which makes him a single-digit cousin to many millions of Downton Abbey fans. Almost half of the people in the column are his single-digit cousins.

The following column is to the founder of Briquebec Castle.“This one is the most fascinating to me,” says Harrison, “because, according to the recorded history mapped out in the Family Forest®, it is one of my own ancestral homes.” And not only does Briquebec Castle have Knights Templar history (remember the “Da Vinci Code”?), but it is possible to book a stay at the castle tonight, and it is the focal point of what may be the world’s largest eBook. In addition to Briquebec being an ancestral home to at least 20 of the 21 people in column one, it is also an ancestral home of the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, owner of Highclere Castle, and the Harbaugh brothers.

And speaking of the Harbaugh brothers, the last column is to the two of them who will be making history by dueling in Super Bowl XLVII this coming Sunday, Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh and San Francisco 49ers head coach Jim Harbaugh.